A Brief History of Aurmera

This is the full written text, for ease of reading. The chronicle in time and space can be viewed under "Timelines."

THE RACES FLEE TO THE SOUTH The region now known as Aurmera was first settled some 400 years ASM (Ante Secui Magnus). The accounts of who first tread south over the Pellum Mountains is lost to time, and every race and state has their own tales to claim legitimacy over the whole of the land. What is known, is that all the races and peoples who braved the icy passes and monster infested gulches were fleeing something. Again, these tales vary. To the Elfish realms, they fled the corruption of man. To the Dwarven Trade Lords, they were seeking to rid themselves of Elvish oppression. Each tale is as far-fetched and varied as the one before. For example, each of the 100 Tribes of Marbata spins a different tale, some explainable and framed in relation to their culture and gods, while others offer more… dreadful reasons to explain the great southern migration. However, If one is to travel across the great grass deserts of Fallvelia and reach the foothills of the Pellums, those treacherous peaks from which all of our ancestors trod, one will find a temple. This temple is older than all of the realms of Aurmera, and they pray to a religion that has long been twisted, fallen to schism, or disregarded as heresy. Those priests who worship the mysterious old gods tell a seldom repeated tale. That what drove the peoples south was not angry gods, rival races, or plagues. It was as terrestrial as you or I. Creatures with dark hearts that lust for death. Perhaps the reason that legends of these horrors that stole our original lands do not permeate our societies is due to the final part of the priest’s account of the old times. These beings still dwell north of the mountains, and are waiting for the hearts of our nobles to grow corrupt and weak. At such time, their advance will continue, and at the edge of the continent, where will we go?
THE SECUI MAGNUS
The respective realms of the races were not always so fractured. In fact, despite ancient rivalry and distrust, most cooperated in harmony following the establishment of the first Kingdoms. For 400 years the Western Men (The Anor), the Elves, The Eastern Men (The Dalor), and the Dwarves peacefully kept watch over their respective Principalities. As is the tale so common across time and peoples, it was corruption and ambition that led to the collapse of the old order, and ushered in our current era. The High Elves of Eldamar deny, and will likely forever deny that the beginning of The Great Split began with the Elves. However, it is well known that it was the Elvish religion that began the chaos, bloodshed, and upheaval that we now refer to as The Secui Magnus. Since before The Great Trek (as it is known to the Elves) their people have primarily worshipped the same four Gods. Among the Aurmeran Pantheon of Gods, these four have always been seen and worshipped as the patrons of the Elves, and are depicted in statues and in shrines as Elves themselves. These gods are as follows: Divinus, the Divine Hierarch, god of faith, purity, and spiritual guidance; Sanctaris, The Celestial Beacon, God of divine illumination, prophesy, and celestial energies; Sylvanius, The Sylvan Guardian, embodiment of nature, balance, and ancient wisdom; and Verdannis. The Forest Warden, protector of flora, fauna, and the interconnected web of nature. According to their ancient scripture, the Elves found purpose in the competing beliefs of Divinus and Sylvanius, taking lessons from each in kind. Sanctaris watched over all Elves, guiding them on their spiritual quests and Verdannis bridged the gap between the city and the woods, fostering harmony with nature. In older Elven culture, the Elves were the chosen people of all the land, and were the heirs to it in perpetuity. This manifested in their somewhat slovenly nature. Never quick to act, always careful stewards of the fields and forests, and hard to convince to take a single side or the other. Their long lives betray them in this way. Is it not easier to think of oneself as the progeny of all the world when you can see 10 generations of man live and die?
This would directly lead to their own undoing and the results would spread across all of Aurmera. The High King of the Elves at the time, King Thilsad, belonged to a more radical order of their religion. He followed a cult whose “High Oculus” preached that complete devotion to Divinus and Sanctaris would hone one’s path to enlightenment, and drive elves on the trek to their rightful place as masters of all the races. This ran directly counter to the gentile philosophies of Sylvanius and Verdannis, who embody and protect nature, balance, wisdom and the interconnection among all things. This cult quickly gained a large following. Particularly among the plebian elves, who heard and believed the cries of “If this land is destined to be ours, then by the Gods, why not then take it by force!?” These cries seduced the Elves especially in the western counties of the kingdom, due to the region being not as wealthy as the east and with it’s people already embittered by the prosperity of the nearby men of the west. The eastern counties were not so easily swayed. The Counts and Lords of the East had grown to resent the authority of the Elven capital in Velanar, seated in the west. The Kings of the last three generations had continuously increased their taxes and centralized authority out of the hands of the Nobility. A very troublesome development for semi-autonomous Lords of the East. The spread of the cultish zealotry was also resisted, as the commoners of the east were more prosperous and dwelled in the dense Emerald Weald. They were and are to this day, incredibly keen on the balance with the wood around them. This is not to say that the Union of Elves was in danger, as at the time these developments were unpopular, but not unpopular enough to cause a rebellion.
Until, King Thilsad rallied his Fiefs and raised his household guard in order to march on the Anor. The Eastern Lords could hardly believe the command when they received the word to immediately march to the western border. It seemed as if the King and his cult would actually attempt to cleanse Aurmera of all other races in order to fulfil their own twisted prophecy and rule over all the land. This event is what we now mark as year 0 of Post Secui Magnus (PSM). As is well known, the Eastern Lords refused their King, instead, rallying with their soldiers to the area’s seat of wealth, Farandale, and proclaimed the Republic of Eldamar, an odd form of governance without a sovereign. The Lords established the High Council of Elves, consisting of all the Nobles and Burghers from across the Eastern Counties. Needless to say, King Thilsad was beside himself with fury. While his kingdom was split, he would never be able to conquer the Anor. Desperate to reunite his people, the King led his sizable force across the Gulf into Marbata. The High Oculus took a smaller, but fanatic force east to prevent any incursions across the new border with their estranged former countrymen. While the king marched north up the Marbata peninsula, his men grew more savage. Any city taken was razed, all settlements were pillaged, and all farms burned. Such is the methods of fanatics. This is now known as the Doom of Marbata. The Eldamari Lords were able to stop their old King in his tracks, over halfway up the peninsula, in the thick forests of the southern Emerald Weald. Thus it was that the Elven Brother War grew stagnant.
After 5 years of war, The Elves of the West, who at this point had begun to refer to their realm as Erolin (meaning “Righteous” in Elven tongue) had only fallen deeper into the throws of fundamentalism and desperation. Leaving his cult priest, the High Oculus, in his lands unchecked would soon yield the result of leaving a wolf in the company of sheep. The Army in Erolin became increasingly zealous. They formed purity tribunals and ritualistically sacrificed any Elf deemed a heretic, or those not adhering to the true tenants espoused by the High Oculus. All actions breed opposite reactions. As the males of the cities were pressed into service in order to fill the ever depleting ranks, the she-elves turned to Lolth for salvation. At first it was underground meetings to pray for their sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands. It is unfortunate that Radicals beget Radicals. As those who prayed to Sylvanius and Verdannis were persecuted, as the she-elve’s sons continued to return home draped in ceremonial wreaths and flowers, the She-Elves grew bitter. They began to believe that perhaps, they were honoring her improperly. Perhaps, the new ways were… insufficient. Their great path had failed them, as here they were with no families and withered homes. Balance had failed them, as all they saw was death. Faith to the wood, flora, and fauna yielded nothing, all they had to eat was gruel. If these were the abject realities around them, then Lolth is surely pleased, and appealing to her dark and hellish nature would surely yield more than the other gods that had failed them. Suffering, death, and waste would grow to be the watchwords of the followers of Lolth and her followers are known to us now as the Dark Elves (The Drow).
As the war entered its 10th year, the Cult of Lolth had grown from an underground group of desperate wives to the prevailing Ideology among She-Elves in Erolin. Staunchly persecuted at first, the High Oculus soon realized that this movement was growing too large to quash. Eldamar was making gains on all fronts, and it seemed that soon the cause would be lost. This would be the year that the High Oculus spread this disease of a conflict to the wider nations of Aurmera. His own beliefs and followers, though bathed in righteousness and truth, could never move beyond the borders of Erolin. They were too obvious and full of pride in their race and religion. However, these Drow, these She-Elves whose beliefs would have them sow pestilence and destruction, might be used to destabilize the rivals of Erolin. Despite their Heresy, The High Oculus chose to exile the followers of Lolth, rather than burn them, under the condition that should they succeed, King Thilsad would allow them to establish an autonomous Arch Bishopric in order to worship their new pantheon as they wished. It was only Eldamar and the Anor who refused refugees. They spread to the great cities of the East, settling into the various regions of the Dalor. The first fruit bore from this treachery would ripen there in the East. The East had always been more tumultuous than the West. With more rugged terrain and a more varied mix of Man, Elves, and Dwarves, tensions would often run high. All the Dark Elves had to do was foment these tensions. The Eastern Kingdom of Men was a Triumvirate. The Liege Lords were the Grand Duke of Irvernia, the High Chieftain of Ofenland, and the Prince of Gamarak. These three held power over their realm, with the title of Protector of the East rotating among them every 5 years. In year 12 of the Elven Brother War, the Grand Duke of Irvernia took a wife. Having lost his first wife in child birth, this was welcomed by the other princes. It was viewed as untraditional that he had taken a Noble Elvish refugee as a wife, but it was widely agreed that this was a wise move to appease the increasing Elvish population that continued to flee the conflict to the west. Only months after the wedding, the Irvernian Capital of Montbeliard would suffer a great fire that consumed much of the city. Soon after, the Grand Duke’s heir would die in a hunting accident, and his 3 daughters would succumb to the Black Flux. Despite these tragedies, the Grand Duke’s demeanor only grew more numb, indifferent, and cold. It is logged that he didn’t even engage in a customary period of mourning, a tradition held sacred by the Easterners. This change in temperament alarmed the Rulers of Ofenland and Gamarak, as the Grand Duke was currently the Protector. The East was always more of a Confederacy than a true unified Kingdom. However, this Union of military and foreign policy had benefitted them all for hundreds of years. Rumors abounded that the Grand Duke had fallen under some sort of black magic, and the misfortunes of the land were being spurred by the new Grand Duchess and her Elven ilk.
The Grand Duke called a meeting of the Triumvirate a month before their typical quarterly Round Table of Eastern Union. Already wrought with suspicion, the High Chieftain and the High Prince doubled their household guards as they set out to Montbeliard. Once they arrived, they sat to feast on the eve of their meeting. Nothing is recorded of the conversation that occurred that night between the Grand Duke, Grand Duchess and their fellow members of the Triumvirate. All that is known is what followed that night. The Household forces of Ofenland and Gamarak stormed the keep where the Grand Duke and Duchess slept, and murdered them both. It is speculated that whatever darkness fell over the Great House of Irvernia, that same darkness attempted to corrupt the other Eastern Leiges. The suspicions of the Chieftain and Prince likely saved their life through the use of some preventative charm. They concluded that immediate action was the only recourse. A cousin of the Duke was captured by the High Prince, and all fled for their respective lands. In the months following, the Armies of Gamarak and the Hordes of Ofenland systematically and ruthlessly purged the whole of the East of Elves. While Eldamar protested diplomatically, they had no spare men to put any tangible force behind their outrage. The Eastern Lieges even incurred into the Dwarven Duchy of Tergund, rounding up Elves and marching them to the sea. When the displacements and pogroms were complete, the living Elves were placed on ships and sent to the uninhabited southern Island of Lindanor. The actions of the Gamarak Army and Ofenland Hordes were so swift that the Irvernian Lords hardly knew why their Union allies were attacking. The people suffered as they always do when Armies are on the march. No matter the reason, no matter if it was just, and no matter if their actions possibly saved the East from ruin, the people of Irvernia remain bitter to this day of the time when their sovereignty was forfeit due to the whims of their neighbors. At the conclusion of the year-long conflagration in the East, no Elves lived beyond Eldamar, and none were allowed to enter for the remaining duration of the war. A new Grand Duke, the captured cousin was placed on the throne of Irvernia by Gamarak, and all Realms of both Dwarf and Man militarized their borders. The Union of the East, the Eastern Triumvirate, the Council of Three Princes, was dissolved.
As word reached the Kingdom of the Anor in the west of the dissolution of the Eastern Union, many Lords and Counts were unworried. After all, the East was distant, the border with the warring Elves was manned, and the Anor near the Elvish realm were and still are intensely xenophobic. No Dark Elfs were allowed to permeate the West. By now, the 13th year of the Elven Brother War, it was known that any refugees caught attempting to cross the border were to be immediately loaded onto ships and sent south across the water to Lindanor. Alas, it is known that the breakup of the Anor from one kingdom into two was not directly caused by outside treachery, but from the inside. As the War entered its 13th year, Erolin had not yet begun to lose, but subsurface cracks were beginning to show. Food shortages, lack of rudimentary goods, and trouble gaining war materiel racked the Kingdom. As a result, the High Oculus began to order small raids into the fertile grasslands of the Fallvelia region to gather food and pillage supplies. The High Oculus had to have known that this would violate Anoran neutrality, but no other race or Kingdom had entered into their Elven war as of yet, and given the scale of bloodshed up to that point, he gambled that none would want to join the bloodbath. As is recorded, this would prove to be the fatal blow for both Erolin and the Kingdom of the Anor.
The raids from Erolin began small at first, small enough that the border Lords dismissed them as the work of brigands. But when dead Erolini Holy Guardsmen were hauled into the Courts of the Castrix River, none doubted any longer. The war had come to Men of the West. Across the Akrus Mountains, the lords of Seretia were convinced of the validity of the incursions, but were not convinced that action was warranted. The Anor of region west of the mountains had always been mostly peaceful, and were happy to have their peacekeeping done through the small host of highly skilled and chivalrous Seretian Knights. On the eastern side of the mountains, the Lords of Fallvelia never had the luxury to weave silk, sell bejeweled wares, send their sons off to frivolous tourneys. They bordered the foreign Elves. They manned the Northern Watches in the foothills of the Pellum Mountains. They dealt with pirates that sailed from the ungoverned islands. While they shared blood with the Anor on the other side of the mountains, they were distinctively more marshal in nature. These differences were superficial throughout most of their history. Seretia grew prosperous through peace and trade, with Fallvelian men manning the forts, borders, and dealing with monster inhabited areas. Fallvelia benefitted from un-tariffed Seretian goods in exchange for their skills as warriors. These differences quickly turned sour when the Erolini raids increased. As the Erolini pool of manpower depleted, they began to capture Fallvelian peasant children to use as slaves. The High Oculus viewed all races apart from Elves as sentient wastes.
The Lords of Fallvellia pleaded with the King of the Anor, seated in Lionscrest, to raise all of his levies and declare formal war on the Elvish zealots. The Lords alone did not have the manpower or money to man all the cities, forts, Northern Guard, and the entire border. The King sympathized with his fiefs, but ultimately did not care to embroil the entire kingdom in a costly foreign civil war. He was also notoriously remembered for not caring for the lives of peasants. It is worth noting that the King was of the House of Heartsbane, one of the wealthiest of the Anor and presided over personal lands exclusively west of the mountains. The Erolini, emboldened by the inaction of the Anor, sacked the border town of Osthold. When the local Lord’s men-at-arms arrived, all that was left was ashes, with the children gone, the men hung, and the women’s decapitated heads arranged into a single Elven word “Maimun” (the Elven word for ‘Ape’). The border Lords decided to take unilateral action against the direct order of the King. The Lords unanimously elected the Lord of Nordholm to be the King East of the Mountains, who pressed every man able to carry a sword to rally at the Aurmerian Road at the border of Erolin. The King of the Anor, now functionally only the King of Seretia, chose not to act. They had always gained paltry profits from the impoverished markets in Fallvelia, and in lieu of having a guard of warriors on their border, they had an entire buffer state. The bloodshed of the Elves would not concern Seretia.
In the 14th and final year of the Elven Brother War, the combined forces of the new Empire of Fallvelia and Republic of Eldamar shattered the lines of the Erolini Zealots. The Eldamaran Scouts tracked the fleeing King Thilsad south through Marbata until he was surrounded. King Thilsad chose death, in order to please his Elven Gods with his final sacrifice. The Eldamari troops were more than happy to oblige. The High Oculus never heard word of his Kings demise, nor would he likely have cared. By the time of the war’s conclusion, the Cult Priest had purged all heretics, established his church as the state religion across the land, and consolidated power around the clergy in the Capital. Within 3 months of defeating the Erolini border army, the Fallvelian forces were laying siege to the Erolini Capital, aided shortly after by the Eldamari Vanguard. No surrender terms were offered and being the fundamentalists that they were, over half of the city had committed suicide by the time the combined army breached the wall. It is speculated that they preferred death to defeat at the hands of mere Monkeys. The other half were starving and weak, but were still mostly found huddled around shines and temples to their Gods. The High Oculus self-immolated in the High Temple, surrounded by Elven words on the walls written in the blood of 40 Fallvelian slave children, as their corpses littered the room. It is rumored that the words translated to “Death is only the beginning, the world of men shall fall” again and again across every surface.
The Eldamari and Fallvelian Armies occupied Erolin for a time. The Republic of Eldamar was nearly bankrupt from years of war, and their Elves who had fought so hard for so long against their corrupted brothers desperately clamored for home. The Fallvelian Army did not suffer from morale issues, but when their petition for more funds was denied by the Seretian King, they too left. The occupation lasted no more than a few months. The remaining clergy in Erolin soon crowned a new ruler, now named the High Reclaimer to lead their new Theocracy. The war had ended. In its wake, the Union of the East lay splintered. The Elvish realm was forever divided by difference of Religion and culture. The Kingdom of Anor was split in two. Marbata was ground into a wild land of tribes and criminals. The Dark Elves were pushed to the edge of the world and banished to the island that would forever after be known as the Isle of Lolth.